There are approximately five million cases yearly of arterial catheterization in the United States. Approximately seven hundred thousand of these cases will have serious complications requiring surgical intervention. Surgical intervention for primary closure of the arterial injury requires an operating team, a standby anesthetist, and an extra day of hospitalization, and as a result can be quite expensive. More conservative treatments such as ultrasound, compression, bed rest and thrombin injections into false aneurysms have been attempted, but these techniques have failed to treat the serious complications of the arterial catheterization.
What is needed is an apparatus and a method for percutaneous arterial closure after catheterization that is nonsurgical and that prevents bleeding and the formation of false aneurysms.